"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."
- Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent
What makes a great opening line?
71–80 of 202 posts
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#72https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/john-steakley/1302-armor.htm...
The first line didn't hook me, because picking up a book is generally a bigger effort than opening a page and looking at the first line.
This idea of "what makes a great opening line" is simply, to be simple to understand for me. You need to lead in to the next line and the next. The wandering text that was the first line of "We Love You Crispina" caused me to skip it. Once I reconsidered that it might have something important in it, I had to force myself to go back and re-read it. Multiple times. I am not going to remember that book.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#73"Gaul is a whole divided into three parts."
"Gallia is quartered in three halves"
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#74"Gaul is a whole divided into three parts."
The best part is lost in translation.
The Latin word for divide is exactly in the middle of the sentence.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#75"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#76He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
(The author later had this opening line as his epitaph. Where it made for a great closing line as well.)
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#77“It began as a mistake.“
Post Office - Bukowski
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#78"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#79Surely: "It was the day my grandmother exploded" warrants a mention..
Iain Banks? Pretty sure it is, can’t remember the title…
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#80"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies."
Reminded me of: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhtO4DsSazc